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Hey guys, I have tried editing the glossary page.
For more terms, visit last year's glossary - It's very helpful
Last years Glossary

• Accessibility - inclusive or universal design principles to address exclusion. Varying ability is the norm, not the exception. Designs for people with disabilities work for others too.

• Activity Theory - Engestrom had ideas in regards of this theory and defined it as Cultural History Activity theory (CHAT). There are six important features within this theory. They are Object,subject,artefact, praxis, division of labour and community.
  • Represents complexity of interaction among subjects,objects,artefacts, and cultural expectations
  • • Visit this website : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oG0ZvkhzCY for more information.

• Artefacts : Things that individuals use or create in their produced work

• Automatic processing: Thinking that is unconscious, unintentional, involuntary. It would be processing of information that guides behaviour, but without conscious awareness and does not interfere with other conscious activity that might be occurring simultaneously. This is fast, allows multitasking but is also vague and sporadic

• ARPANET -

• Bodystorming - is a technique used in interaction design or as a creativity technique. The idea is to imagine what it would be like if the product existed, and act as though it exists. According to Anne Fairbrother bodystorming “is a participatory method for demonstrating or developing ideas in a physical setting.”

• Biomimicry - (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a new discipline that studies nature's best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems. Studying a leaf to invent a better solar cell is an example.

• BA - a diffuse concept regarding shared knowledge ecology/environment

• Contradictions - There are four types : [They are defined under the appropriate letters]
  1. Primary
  2. Secondary
  3. Tertiary
  4. Quaternary

• CHAT -

• Consumer-based-design - design whose research ansd basis is predicated on ethnographic (or similar) studies, where the researcher(s) gather data and information which allows them to create designs aimed to directly satisfy consumer needs. The design must also be intuitive, affordable and user-friendly, as per its title.

• Controlled processing - focused but limited, slow but thorough, hard to sustain for long period of time.

• Case study - focusing on one instance - "thick description"

• Conceptual scenarios - Identification of common themes and problems that build conceptual models. It is used for generating ideas for design alternatives, specifying requirements.

• Concrete scenarios - They define requirements from conceptual scenarios more concretely. It operates on physical/prototypical models which start involving technologies and interaction patters at a general level.

• Chunking - mnemonics and relations help memorizing

• Combination: analysis and reformatting of explicit knowledge into new knowledge

• Collaborative virtual environments -VR which embodies user in virtual space that can afford interaction with other embodied users in real time.

• Data mining**
  • - includes observation without being there. They are quantitative artifacts . It records consequences of actual action.

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• Ergonomics - The study of the fit between humans and the things they use both physical and psychological. For example a chair is ergonomically designed if it considers the shape of a persons back and provides support for the back while the person is sitting. When computers arrived ergonomics had to take on the psychological fit between people and the devices (called cognitive ergonomics).

• Externalization - Externalize costs of production by not accounting how much it is actually worth such as workers salary, loss of natural resources, clean air, and childrens education in third world countries. We aren't actually paying as much as the product is worth. Conversion of tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge

• Engagement - Function of engagement

1. Identity
2. Adaptivity
3. Narrative
4. Immersion
5. Flow

• Electronic meeting systems (EMSs)

• Experiments - are controlled specific measurement of phenomenon.

• External representations - anything outside individual that guides activity ( for example: notes, diagrams )

• Focus group - allow for discussion between members within a controlled environment on a given topic that can be observed and analyzed

• Flow models - include the analysis of flow of information and its potential breakdown. Flow is often circular that includes feedback loops.

• Graphical user interface (GUI) - what the site/program user sees. No programming language but design and usability.

• Ground-up Innovation - no middle man, no central authority, inclusionary - if people don't have access to an ATM machine they are acting as their own ATM machine, their way of controlling their own income

• Gestalt's theory -
  1. Part/Whole - Understanding parts as part of the system
  2. Proximity - close things are grouped together
  3. Continuity - when patterns are completed
  4. Similarity - when similar things are grouped together
  5. Closure - happens when we fill in the gaps

• Human Centered Design-

• Inclusive Capitalism - people/countries are starting to build their own capitalism within the country rather than having other companies coming into the country incorporating capitalism that will benefit that particular company.

• Interviews - are discussions with individuals to discover their perspective or opinion. They can be structured or unstructured.

• Internal representations - individual mental models of reality.

• Internalization: reintegration into tacit knowledge (learning by doing)

• IMPACT- Intentions, Metrics, People, Activities, Context, Technology

• "Just in Time" - produce things that are needed in the supply chain at the time being. When people call, that's when products are made rather than being stock held. This process is environmentally pro-active hence doesn't create a lot of waste, stuff isn't left over and sold at cost.

• Jonathan Ive -

• Knowledge management-Creates and shares shared representations

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• Material Economy - In short, the FIVE steps that trace the path of resources from their obtainment to their disposal. The five steps are Extraction [the collection of resources from the natural environment, often to the detriment of the latter], Production [the transformation of these resources into consumer goods and services, often with the use of dangerous processes and toxic chemicals], Distribution [the transportation of these goods towards future consumers, with the distributors' goals being to keep prices down and demand up to sell off 'the junk' ASAP, leaving workers and employees to suffer low wages and poor conditions], Consumption [the most important step which drives the whole economy, where the goods and services are consumed by us at a perpetually increasing rate, as it is in the best interest of governments and corporations to keep this going] and Disposal [where the goods are, often expensively and inappropriately, disposed of in a myriad of ways, which tends to damage the environment and endanger our health and safety]. Together all these steps make up the Material Economy

• Micro-financing - is the provision of financial services to low-income clients, including consumers and the self-employed, who traditionally lack access to banking and related services

• MoSCow - This is the model of priotization. The following are the elements of the model
  1. Include must have features ( without this, it would be useless)
  2. Include should have ( if these are includes there is a clear value -added requirement but it still could work without it )
  3. Could have ( not essential - would be nice)
  4. Want to but won't have ( wait until future iterations)

Mental models - are parsimonious models of reality

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• PACT - stands for people, activities, contexts, technologies

• Perception - is a sensory phenomenon, but is influenced by past expectations,culture and motivation

• Perceived Obsolescence- Want things before they actually have to be replaced, makes us think stuff has changed by changing the look of it, high fashion, keeps you buying through ads, always want to fit in, everything is wrong but can be fixed through shopping

• Physical Computing: means building interactive physical systems by the use of software and hardware that can sense and respond to the analog world (source: wiki)

• Planned Obsolescence - designed for the dump, make stuff useless and garbage as quickly as possible so we'll have to get a new one, how fast can they make stuff break which still leaves the consumer with enough faith in the product that they'll still go out and buy a new one

• Pogo-sticking - comparison shopping technique, bouncing between pages if they couldn't find enough information on one site. This results in loss of sales.

• Principles of Universal Design - Equitable, Flexible, Simple, Perceptible, Tolerant, Effortless, "just right" size and space.

• Prototype

• Primary contradiction- conflict at node (e.g., two subjects having different notions) •

• Qualitative Research - Qualitative research is a generic term for investigative methodologies described as ethnographic, naturalistic, anthropological, field, or participant observer research. It emphasizes the importance of looking at variables in the natural setting in which they are found.

• Quantitative Methods - it involves metrics where everything is reduced to numbers. It is inferential instead of merely being descriptive.

• Quaternary contradiction - conflicts between simultaneous activities (e.g., one activity diagram contradicts another)

• Reverse Engineer - take something (Ipod) that is already created apart and find out how it works in order to understand how to put it back together and eventually make. This requires a lot of social networking focused on knowledge that is floating around.

• Recall - happens when you retrieve specific bits

• Recognition - is relational connections you make

• SECI - Abberiviation for socialization, externalization, combination, internalization. Refer to these words for definition.

• SMCR - Source, Message, Channel, Receiver model

• Short term memory - It is short term storage - about thirty seconds.

• Secondary source analysis - is when you obtain information from what's already out there

• Surveys/Questionnaires - are the common method of obtaining information from broad cross-section of people.

• Secondary contradiction - conflict between nodes (e.g., power relations interfering with successful formation of object)

• Scales - are set of related questions measuring attitudes, beliefs, orientations, etc

• Scenarios - include a narrative that is accessible and useful to explain problems to stakeholders. They outline complexity to designers in context that is shaped both by designers and users.

• Shared representations - individuals come together over external representations to create shared understanding or confusion per say.

• Socialization: engagement with others, often driven and shaped by tacit knowledge

• Tertiary contradiction - conflicts when activities are redesigned (e.g., change in model conflicts with old expectations)

• Universal Design: Principles are as follows:
  1. Equitable
  2. flexible
  3. simple
  4. perceptible
  5. tolerant
  6. effortless
  7. just right size and space

• Use Cases - formalized interaction patterns

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